Let me start by making something clear. I am no unqualified admirer of the late Cardinal George Pell.

On the day in 2020 that Pell was released after the High Court quashed his sexual abuse conviction, and was witheringly critical of the Victorian justice system that brought about a monstrous miscarriage of justice, I wrote:

As a parish priest, diocesan bishop, archbishop and head of the Catholic Church in Australia, Pell’s moral failure to lead, to act swiftly and decisively to ensure paedophile clergy were tried and punished rather than moved and covered up, and its failure to purge those parts of the Church under his care of their evil stain, cannot be quashed.

Three years on, I still haven’t changed my view about Pell, the church leader. But Pell the man was effectively put on trial for the sins of others in his church, on the very slightest of accusations. The Catholic Church and her vipers’ nest of cassocked abusers was put on trial through him.

That was vengeance-seeking, not criminal justice.

On the same day I wrote, Victoria’s premier Daniel Andrews also made a statement. He said:

‘I make no comment about today’s High Court decision. But I have a message to every victim and survivor of child sexual abuse:

‘I see you.

‘I hear you.

‘I believe you.’

It could be argued that what Andrews was really saying was something along the lines of, ‘There was a miscarriage of justice in the Pell case. And it wasn’t the charges, the verdict, or the judicial mismanagement of the Supreme Court of Victoria. It was the High Court throwing the case out and vindicating Pell.’

In other words, the Premier of Victoria quietly refused to accept the rule of law, because he didn’t agree with the outcome.

Nearly three years later, Andrews hasn’t changed. A day after Pell’s unexpected death in Rome (in circumstances tailor-made for conspiracy theories), in rejecting suggestions that Pell’s family be offered a state funeral for the most senior Catholic churchman Australia has produced, Andrews said:

‘I think that would be a deeply, deeply distressing thing for every survivor of Catholic Church child sex abuse. That is my view. And I will not do that…I’m not here to do anything other than send my message of condolence to his family and friends, but I think more importantly, at what will be a very challenging time for victim-survivors, to send the clearest possible message that we see you, we believe you, we support you, and you are at the centre of not only our thoughts, not only our words, but our actions.’

Incidentally, Andrews didn’t have to answer the question at all. Pell’s funeral and burial will be in Sydney, not Melbourne. 

The issue here isn’t that Andrews, like his NSW counterpart Dominic Perrottet, has declined to offer Pell a state funeral. That’s understandable, given Pell presided over a Catholic Church that too long turned blind eyes to abuse by clergy, and in too many cases harboured them by moving them from parish to parish. Given what I wrote three years ago, it would be hypocritical to suggest otherwise.

What angers me today is that when it comes to Pell himself, Andrews appears to be denying the outcome of Australia’s criminal justice system. He didn’t like the final verdict, refused to accept it, and effectively he is denigrating it by his emotive outbursts at the time, and again yesterday.

It seems Andrews only believes in the rule of law when it suits him or his purposes.

Yet this is the self-same Victorian Premier who expected Victorians to follow his repressive Covid instructions to the letter, backed by heavy-handed enforcement when his government deemed it necessary.

The self-same Victorian Premier who expected Victorians to obey his lawful authority without question, knowing that most Victorians accept the rule of law by lawfully-constituted authority, even when they don’t agree with it.

But when it comes to the Premier, he is happy to use the bully pulpit of his office to make his feelings known about the High Court’s unanimous decision to quash Pell’s false conviction, and effectively is encouraging others to do the same.

Double standards in public life are commonplace. But when someone who expected everyone else to obey the rule of law as he saw it, when so many law-abiding Victorians still obeyed despite questioning or outright opposing what he imposed on us – despite the personal, social, and economic costs – the Premier’s posturing is galling.

And the fact that in his carefully-chosen remarks on Pell, failing to show any grace in referring to the late cardinal as ‘the bloke’, reflects poorly on Andrews the man as well as Andrews the premier, suggesting a heart incapable of doing the one thing that George Pell did manage from the depths of his humiliation and imprisonment: understanding and forgiveness.